Word: timbuctoo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Only after four decades of exploration did the world learn that the Niger flowed northeast, then took a mighty turn at Timbuctoo and continued south into the Gulf of Guinea at the slave-trading settlement called Brass...
Geographical mysteries were thus solved, but the region's weakened and debased societies and its fever-ridden travelers remained baffling to each other. In 1854 a German Lutheran explorer named Heinrich Earth was detained in Timbuctoo for eight months before rival political factions agreed to release him. An Arab officer in favor of Earth's execution spoke disapprovingly of Christians: "They sit like women in the bottom of their steamboats and do nothing but eat raw eggs...
...personal matters, Lady Bird can be startlingly honest. There is, for example, the matter of Luci's conversion to Roman Catholicism, which brought out the Bible Belt streak in Lady Bird. "I feel a sense of separation," she confesses, "as though she were going off to live in Timbuctoo." She was fearful, or at least apprehensive, about the so-called Eastern establishment. The woman who routinely entertained the world's leaders reverted to the girl from Karnack, Texas, on a trip to Boston. She meekly accepted a scolding from a pushy Adams descendant who complained of being left...